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NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has long maintained that the department’s controversial stop-and-frisk strategy does not target New Yorkers based on the color of their skin, despite the fact that in fifty-one percent of those stopped last year were black and 32 percent Hispanic. A federal trial challenging the constitutionality of stop-and-frisk is currently underway in federal court in Manhattan, and today a State Senator testified that Kelly once admitted to him that stop-and-frisk targeted blacks and Hispanics—and that the policy was intended to “instill fear.”

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What would you do if you logged in to your bank account someday and it showed that you had a zero balance and your bank had no record that you ever had any money in your account? What would you do if all of the money in your bank account suddenly disappeared in a single moment? If you had not kept any paper records, which most Americans do not, it would be exceedingly difficult to prove to the bank that you actually had any money in the bank. If you don’t think that something like this could ever happen in the United States, you might want to think again. Cyber attacks against major banks in the United States are becoming more powerful and more sophisticated with each passing month. In fact, major U.S. bank websites have been offline for a total of 249 hours over the past six weeks. And just last month, thousands upon thousands of Chase customers logged into their bank accounts only to discover that their balances had all been reset to zero.

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It used to be high school drop outs flipping burgers at McDonald’s, now the fast-food joint is demanding a bachelors degree. In a frightening example of how competitive the job market is for young people right now, a McDonald’s outpost in Winchedon, Massachusetts, has just posted a call-out for a full time cashier – but insists only college graduates need apply. And even they must have 1-2 years of cashier experience before they’ll be trusted with the Big-Mac-selling responsibility, according to the advert.

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Whether it was admitted or denied, a lot of Black Hollyweird is getting lighter for some reason and a lot of people suspect skin bleaching. Some can argue that celebrities are influenced to do it because of the better treatment lighter complexions receive in Hollywood for television, magazines, and better endorsements. However, we can all agree that these celebs have gotten a little lighter over the years and it ain’t just bad makeup. Hit the flip and peep for yourself, let us know which ones you think are bleaching!

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Early drug traffickers stashed their loads in obvious places: wheel wells, spare tires, the nooks of engine blocks. Starting in the early 1980s, however, they switched to what the Drug Enforcement Administration refers to as “urban traps”: medium-size compartments concealed behind electronically controlled facades. The first such stash spots were usually located in the doors of luxury sedans; trap makers, who are often moonlighting auto body specialists, would slice out the door panels and then attach them to the motors that raised and lowered the windows. They soon moved on to building traps in dashboards, seats, and roofs, with button-operated doors secured by magnetic locks. Over time, the magnets gave way to hydraulic cylinders, which made the doors harder to dislodge during police inspections.

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After receiving the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama has made perpetual war look more perpetual than ever. Today, there are more U.S. troops in Afghanistan than when Obama took office. His presidency has widened the use of drones and other instruments of remote killing in several countries. Please sign this petition to the Norwegian Nobel Committee:

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MBP, a procedure practiced by some ultra-Orthodox mohels, involves a mohel orally sucking away the blood from the infant’s genital area after cutting off his foreskin during the bris, or ritual circumcision. The practice can infect newborns with herpes simplex virus type 1, according to medical authorities. It’s a virus that, while not serious for adults, can be fatal for infants, or cause permanent cognitive or physical damage. Most mohels in this country use a sterile pipette for for suctioning the blood. But many ultra-Orthodox mohels consider direct suction of the genital area by mouth to be mandated by the Talmud as part of the religious rite.

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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has had a “no fly zone” in place in Mayflower, Arkansas since April 1 at 2:12 PM and will be in place “until further notice,” according to the FAA website and it’s being overseen by ExxonMobil itself. In other words, any media or independent observers who want to witness the tar sands spill disaster have to ask Exxon’s permission. Mayflower is the site of the recent major March 29 ExxonMobil Pegagus tar sands pipeline spill, which belched out an estimated 5,000 barrels of tar sands diluted bitumen (“dilbit”) into the small town’s neighborhoods, causing the evacuation of 22 homes.

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Tens of thousands of gallons of oil have flooded some of the streets and yards of Mayflower, Arkansas. The Exxon tar sands oil spill is small taste of what we would see if the Keystone XL Pipeline is approved. The media is largely being kept away from this spill. In the video you can see that Exxon’s plan to clean it up consists mostly of hoses and paper towels.

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A survey conducted by Public Policy Polling, labeled by many as a pro-Obama outfit, seems to be aimed at ascribing belief in “crazy conspiracy theories” to Republicans by mixing in real cover-ups and conspiracies with outlandish ideas. However, despite the constant media drumbeat about the clear move towards centralization of power being a baseless conspiracy theory, the poll reveals that 28 per cent of Americans believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order.” 46 per cent of respondents do not believe this notion, while 25 per cent are not sure. Good news! Maybe alternative media is getting through to people? And why shouldn’t they, they are bombarded with facts everyday backed up by the shady, secretive actions of their government and corporations. -Mort

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In 1991 a group of three researchers published a paper that described a method for casting a mold of the vagina using material more commonly used to make dental impressions. In short, liquid polymer goo is injected into a willing woman’s vagina with a kind of caulk gun. She waits ten minutes. Then with the help of KY, squatting and pushing, and the string from a tampon that was inserted before the material dried, the mold is removed. Though this paper included only two participants, a few years later the same researchers (plus a couple of others) published another study that examined vaginal molds of 39 women. In these women, all Caucasian, vaginal lengths ranged from almost 7 to almost 15 centimeters (2.75–6 in) with diameters between 2.4 and 6.5 cm (~1–2.5 in). A later study classified the diversity of vaginal shapes: conical, parallel sides, heart, slug, and pumpkin seed. (I can’t be the only one hoping that my vagina looks like a pumpkin seed instead of a slug.)

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When Geico gave the go-ahead on a new ad for motorcycle insurance set to the iconic Midnight Rider by the Allman Brothers, we’re guessing the company didn’t realize band members Duane Allman and Berry Oakley both died in motorcycle accidents within a year of one another. The deaths are the stuff of rock and roll legend, as both Oakley and Allman perished in crashes in Macon, Georgia within a block of one another back in the early ’70s.

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An ancient statue of Mars has lost its fake penis and his counterpart Venus her hands, in the reversal of cosmetic changes ordered by Italy’s ex-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, a newspaper reported Wednesday. In 2010 Berlusconi decided the two marble statues adorning the official residence of the prime minister were “incomplete” and ordered a swift intervention to remedy their shortcomings. In a move which horrified the art world, Mars was touched up with a fake penis, shield, hand and the point of his sword and Venus her two hands.

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A hunger strike at the US prison camp at Guantanamo has grown to include 130 of the 166 inmates, according to the lawyer for one of the prisoners. Clive Stafford Smith says he has been told by his client Shaker Aamer that camp officials have been trying to break the hunger strike without success. The US Defense Department said just under 40 prisoners are refusing food and 11 are being force fed after the latest hunger strike started seven weeks ago. Concerned by events there, the International Committee of the Red Cross recently brought forward a scheduled visit to the camp by a doctor. The ICRC does not comment publicly on its findings at the camp.

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The earth will shudder with earthquakes, and every bond and fetter will burst, freeing the terrible wolf Fenrir. The sea will rear up because Jormungand, the Midgard Serpent, is twisting and writhing in fury as he makes his way toward the land. With every breath, Jormungand will stain the soil and the sky with his poison. The waves caused by the serpent’s emerging will set free the ship Naglfar, and with the giant Hymir as their commander, the giants will sail towards the battlefield. From the realm of the dead a second ship will set sail, and this ship carries the inhabitants of hell, with Loki as their helmsman. The fire giants, led by the giant Surt, will leave Muspell in the south to join against the gods. Surt, carrying a sword that blazes like the sun itself, will scorch the earth.

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THE EXPERIMENT There are no meats, fruits, vegetables, or breads here. Besides olive oil for fatty acids and table salt for sodium and chloride nothing is recognizable as food. I researched every substance the body needs to survive, plus a few extras shown to be beneficial, and purchased all of them in nearly raw chemical form from a variety of sources. The section on the ingredients ended up being quite long so I’ll save that for a future post. The first morning my kitchen looked more like a chemistry lab than a cookery, but I eventually ended up with an thick, odorless, beige liquid. I call it ‘Soylent’. At the time I didn’t know if it was going to kill me or give me superpowers. I held my nose and tepidly lifted it to my mouth, expecting an awful taste.

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It’s not just Twitter. It’s broader than that. Within the verbal, well-educated, politically conscious social group that most bloggers belong to, we’ve always been expected to keep up with things. The problem is that “keeping up” increasingly means being surrounded by an endless torrent of tweets, texts, blogs, and Tumblrs demanding our attention. With traditional physical forms of news consumption no longer acting as natural limits, the risk of relapse into obsession is never more than a ringtone away, with nothing but raw self discipline as our last line of defense. Modern social norms don’t allow us to turn this stuff off completely, but for those of us who are vulnerable to this kind of addiction, ever advancing technology conspires to turn us into nervous wrecks if we don’t.

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Some people are into spelunking through the urban ruins and crevasses of unfamiliar cities. The National Counterterrorism Center has a term for these sorts of people: terrorist dupes. “Urban Explorers (UE) — hobbyists who seek illicit access to transportation and industrial facilities in urban areas — frequently post photographs, video footage, and diagrams on line [sic] that could be used by terrorists to remotely identify and surveil potential targets,” warns the nation’s premiere all-source center for counterterrorism analysis.

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Kowloon Walled City, located not far from the former Kai Tak Airport, was a remarkable high-rise squatter camp that by the 1980s had 50,000 residents. A historical accident of colonial Hong Kong, it existed in a lawless vacuum until it became an embarrassment for Britain. This month marks the 20th anniversary of its demolition.

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“Replying to questions posted on Facebook by The New York Times, Daylina Miller, a recent graduate of the University of South Florida, said that when she poured out her sadness online, some readers responded only with the Facebook ‘like’ symbol: a thumb’s up. ‘You feel the same way?’ said Ms. Miller, puzzled. ‘Or you like that I’m sad? You’re sadistic?’” Similarly inauspicious examples of the constriction of empathy and warping of inter-human relations include the “liking” of death announcements. On my own Facebook feed, I’ve witnessed friends post news of a parent’s death only to be bombarded with the thumb’s up and comments to the effect of: “Sorry man!” In addition to a cheapening of sentiment, Facebook also encourages alienation from reality by displacing the space-time continuum: instead of experiencing events and thoughts as they occur in real-time, users are often distracted by how best to market these events and thoughts to their Facebook audiences.

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“The lingerie, laced with modules of global positioning system (GPS), global system for mobile communications (GSM) and also pressure sensors, is capable of sending shock waves of 3,800 kV as well as alerts to the girl’s parents and police,” says Manisha Mohan, co-developer of the innovative product named Society Harnessing Equipment (SHE). “The shocks can be emitted up to 82 times,” she said, adding it’s an apt device which could get women “freedom from situations faced in bus, public places”, where at times they are reluctant to walk down to lawmakers for help. “A person trying to molest a girl will get the shock of his life the moment pressure sensors get activated, and the GPS and GSM modules would send a SMS on emergency number 100, as well as to parents of the girl. Thanks Jasmine.

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Police said “Suave”, a Miami pimp, allegedly forced a 13-year-old runaway to tattoo his street name on her eyelids. The pimp, who has a lengthy rap sheet, allegedly forced the girl to a Liberty City flea market tattoo shop to get the ink done after she threatened to leave him, CBS4 news partner The Miami Herald reports.

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Transcendental Meditation is just a fancy name for a common variety of meditation in which a mantra – a word or series of syllables – is repeated with the intention of creating a meditative state. Pretty much any word or syllable will do, despite the hype of TM, which insists that a mantra can only be given by a “qualified” instructor. The TM initiate is told never to reveal her mantra under any circumstances, lest its magic be lost. My instructor suggested that he had some particular insight into me in choosing my mantra, but this is utter nonsense. People who have taught TM have admitted that they are given a list of mantras they’re supposed to divvy out according to age and gender. Nothing mystical about it. Here’s one list, which contains a version of my “personal” mantra. In violation of the sacred rules of TM, I’m now going to reveal it to you: “aima.” That’s my mantra. Two syllables. Vaguely pleasant sounding.

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A man who crashed his car into a San Jose Walmart Sunday morning and began randomly beating people with a metal club was likely under the influence of methamphetamine, police said. The incident occurred just after 11 a.m., as a man who has not yet been named crashed his red Oldsmobile Cutlas into two other cars in the parking lot of a Walmart store, then cruised along a walkway near the front doors before plowing through the entrance. The driver kept on the gas for another 30 feet until the car finally came to a stop atop a beer display, at which point the driver exited and began assaulting people nearby with a metal club

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A recently passed nuisance control ordinance has spurred a citywide crackdown on house shows—concerts played in private homes, rather than in clubs. The police, it appears, are taking a particularly modern approach to address the issue: They’re posing as music fans online to ferret out intel on where these DIY shows are going to take place. While police departments have been using social media to investigate for years, its use in such seemingly trivial crimes would be rather chilling, if these efforts didn’t seem so laughably inept. It’s a law enforcement technique seemingly cribbed from MTV’s Catfish—but instead of creating a fake persona to ensnare the marks in a romantic internet scam, it’s music fandom that’s being feigned.

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While popes have for centuries washed the feet of the faithful on the day before Good Friday, never before had a pontiff washed the feet of a woman. That one of the female inmates at the prison in Rome was also a Serbian Muslim was also a break with tradition.

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Gorilla in Prague Zoo hangs himself

The zoo said in a statement that 5-year-old Tatu was found hanging with a rope around his neck Friday morning in a sleeping room. Spokesman Michal Stastny said all attempts to revive Tatu failed. He said there were no cameras in the room and it is not clear exactly what happened. Mammals curator Pavel Brandl said Tatu likely unbraided one of the dozens ropes the gorillas use in their pavilion for climbing and put a strand around his neck before hanging himself.

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Angelina Spencer, the executive director of the Association of Club Executives, which serves as a trade association for strip clubs, said an informal survey of convention business in New York and Denver had determined that Republicans dropped more money at clubs, by far. “Hands down, it was Republicans,” she said. “The average was $150 for Republicans and $50 for Democrats.”

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Cult activity is suspected after a woman’s body was stolen from a southern New Jersey mausoleum. Pleasantville police said someone broke into the mausoleum, which has six gravesites, on Thursday night or Friday morning and stole the body of Pauline Spinelli, who had died in 1996 at the age of 98, according to the Associated Press. Police also said the body might have been taken for use in some sort of ritual.

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The United States today has a vast intelligence apparatus, on the ground, in the sky and even in space. Technically it puts the old Soviet Union to shame, and sucks up millions of terabytes of data daily. But, that doesn’t mean that what is reported is understood. The analysts seek to make sense of it but the policy makers are often so locked into templates of action and pre-formulated strategies that insure the input doesn’t lead to course corrections or changes in direction. They operate with a kind of intellectual “locked-in” disease that freezes out new ideas. The system is manned by ideologists and choked with ideology, constantly leading to so-called intelligence ‘failures’ that fill many library shelves. Yet even when post mortems are filed, few in the commanding heights of our national security apparatus is willing to look back and draw lessons. They are too busy, lazy or just hacks (as opposed to hackers.)

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Much has been made of government’s power to survey citizens using technologies such as packet capture and deep packet inspection. Even used in a limited fashion, these technologies can gather massive amounts of data on the online behaviors of individuals, and when taken together they can create an electronic profile of people’s lives. That potential—and concerns about its abuse—have driven privacy advocates to push for the repeal or alteration of laws such as the PATRIOT Act. At the same time, US law enforcement and intelligence agencies have struggled over the past decade to take all of this information and put it to use. The poor search capabilities of the FBI’s software, inadequate user training, and the fragmented nature of the organization’s intelligence databases all meant there was no way for anyone involved in the investigation to have a complete picture of what was going on with Hasan.

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Matrix director Larry Wachowski is now a ‘she’, after undergoing a sex-change operation. For some time now, the film director has been answering to ‘Lana Wachowksi’, and says she has been “transitioning” from male to female for a number of years. At a Los Angeles movie promo last week, Wachowski showed up in a gray dress and fuchsia dreadlocks, announcing in a German accent: “Hi, I’m Lana.” It isn’t known whether the Matrix director’s public switching of genders is complete yet, but this was far from Wachowski’s first big public appearance as Lana: she was appearing in public as early as 2004, at events such as the San Diego Comic-Con.

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At first glance, it could be a dramatic scene from a science-fiction movie. But this giant hole of fire in the heart of the Karakum Desert is not the aftermath of an attack on Earth, launched from outer space. It is a crater made by geologists more than 40 years ago, and the flames within have been burning ever since. Welcome to Derweze in Turkmenistan – or, as the locals have called it, ‘The Door to Hell’.

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‘Women and children first’ is a myth, shipwreck study shows

The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was based on the premise that crew members and male passengers stood the greatest chance of survival in a free-for-all ship evacuation, owing to greater strength and knowledge of the vessel. If men chose to sacrifice themselves for the sake of women and children, however, their survival rates should suffer accordingly. They did not. In examining 18 shipping disasters dating to the 1850s, the economists found little evidence that men were inclined to surrender their survival advantage. Overall, the survival rate was 61% for crew members, 44% for captains, 37% for male passengers, 27% for women and 15% for children.

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The opening ceremony of the Olympics was very symbolic. Although for those who lacked the eyes to see & understand it, it was a boring show compared to past opening ceremonies. This is typical of inducing & using the occult symbols within something like this. It’s there but it’s hidden. The baby that showed up in the stadium egg was the sun/son rebirth we’ve been talking about for weeks. All after the ‘exorcism’ of the scary nightmares from the minds and imagination of the children…orphans being tended to by nurses and such…symbolic of the human species being abandoned by their ‘gods’ in the myths and stories of our ancient origins.

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Daley and partner Pete Waterfield slipped into fourth place after an error on their fourth of six attempts spoiled an otherwise consistent performance. Soon afterward, Daley reposted a message from a Twitter user called Rileyy69 that read: “You let your Dad down, I hope you know that.” [ Related: American athletes defy IOC ban on social media use to promote sponsors ] Daley added his own message to the retweet, saying: “After giving my all, you get idiot’s (sic) sending me this.” Daley has more than 780,000 followers and following his response, his Twitter tormentor was bombarded with messages from angry fans. Yahoo! Sports understands he then threatened one of the respondents, while claiming he would “drown” Daley. He later tried to backtrack by sending an apology. Police were already preparing to get involved by that point, though, as part of an ongoing crackdown by British law enforcement on social media abuse, particularly that directed toward high profile figures.

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The end of the world is nigh. Or so you might think if you immersed yourself in American popular culture. From TV adverts to Hollywood movies, depictions of post-apocalyptic worlds are everywhere. There is a long tradition of such apocalyptic thinking in the US. But as Matthew Barrett Gross and Mel Giles argue in their book The Last Myth, it has now moved beyond religious prophecies into the secular world. The authors also claim that activists from both the political left and right have embraced apocalypse thinking, issuing dramatic warnings that everything from the traditional American way of life to the very existence of the planet is under threat. Barrett Gross spoke to the BBC in Utah to explain why he believes the rise of apocalyptic thinking prevents some people from trying to reach more pragmatic solutions to 21st Century problems.

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The pills, made by Proteus Digital Health, have sand-particle-sized silicon chips with small amounts of magnesium and copper on them. After they’re swallowed, they generate voltage as they make contact with digestive juices. That signals a patch on the person’s skin, which then relays a message to a mobile phone given to a healthcare provider. It’s only been approved for use with placebos right now, but the company is hoping to get it approved for use with other drugs (which would be where it would get the most use).

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Is the Sky Blue?

A recent episode of Radiolab centered on questions about colors. It profiled a British man who, in the 1800s, noticed that neither The Odyssey nor The Iliad included any references to the color blue. In fact, it turns out that, as languages evolve words for color, blue is always last. Red is always first. This is the case in every language ever studied. Scholars theorize that this is because red is very common in nature, but blue is extremely rare. The flowers we think of as blue, for example, are usually more violet than blue; very few foods are blue. Most of the blue we see today is part of artificial colors produced by humans through manufacturing processes. So, blue is the last color to be noticed and named. An exception to the rarity of blue in nature, of course — one that might undermine this theory — is the sky. The sky is blue, right?

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It’s a virus that originated in birds, but the newest strain of avian flu has killed 162 harbor seals in New England and scientists warn it could be even more dangerous if it jumps to humans. Researchers revealed on Tuesday that the aquatic mammals, which washed up dead or dying on the shores of Maine and northern Massachusetts last fall, were infected with the H3N8 strain of influenza. The seals suffered horrifying skin lesions, a previously unknown symptom in flu deaths, and pneumonia as a result of a virus that they contracted from North American waterfowl, according to researchers at Columbia University. Even more worrying is the fact that the virus has mutated to develop the ability to infect the cells of mammals — a first for the avian pathogen.

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Thomas Pugh and colleagues explain that concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and microscopic particulate matter (PM) — both of which can be harmful to human health — exceed safe levels on the streets of many cities. Past research suggested that trees and other green plants can improve urban air quality by removing those pollutants from the air. However, the improvement seemed to be small, a reduction of less than 5 percent. The new study sought a better understanding of the effects of green plants in the sometimes stagnant air of city streets, which the authors term “urban street canyons.” The study concluded that judicious placement of grass, climbing ivy and other plants in urban canyons can reduce the concentration at street level of NO2 by as much as 40 percent and PM by 60 percent, much more than previously believed. The authors even suggest building plant-covered “green billboards” in these urban canyons to increase the amount of foliage.

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Rochester, NY Police officers Rob Osipovitch and Ryan Hartley, falsely accused Mr. Barideaux of failing to come to a complete stop in order to have a reason to pull him over. But thanks to the power of video, Osipovitch and Hartley never stopped to think that City of Rochester traffic cameras were recording the whole incident. And that the video recorded their lie. After the illegal stop and search of Mr. Barideaux’s vehicle, the Rochester Police Department claims that the officers found drugs and a weapon. After spending four months in jail, Monroe County Court Judge Daniel Doyle dismissed all charges against Barideaux. In his decision to dismiss the charges, Judge Doyle said “it was an unreasonable stop… based on the review of the video, there’s no ambiguity at all that a car being operated by Jeramie Barideaux did come to a complete stop before the police stopped the vehicle.”

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The face is pretty unmistakable: The features look strikingly similar to the now iconic visage that’s been burned into our collective consciousness over the past ten days. But this face doesn’t belong to the person alleged to have shot seventy people at an Aurora movie theater just after midnight on July 20. This one belongs to a promising San Diego-based singer/songwriter named Chris Holmes, who just happens to share a surname — and a gene pool — with a suspected mass murderer: James Holmes, who’ll be back in Arapahoe County District Court this morning.

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On average, according to the organization, a multiple-victim shooting happens every 5.9 days in the United States. The deadliest city in this period, according to the data, is Chicago, with 17 shootings since 2005—totaling 72 people wounded and 30 deaths. Thirteen of those shootings were in a public place. New Orleans, Kansas City, and Philadelphia were tied for second bloodiest, with nine shootings in this seven-year period. Plus, James Warren on why the Colorado shooting is tragically unsurprising. Thanks Jasmine

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“Facebook will become the poster child for the current social-media bubble,” warns economist Gary Shilling in his latest Forbes column, “just as Pets.com was for the dot-com bubble.” Yes, Wall Street is repeating the 2000 dot-com crash as today’s social-media bubble crashes and burns.

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The decentralized nature of the Internet, and the fact that the global network is built from a thicket of independent public and private networks, is limiting efforts to protect against such attacks, said Alexander, because it doesn’t allow the NSA or law enforcement to easily track Internet activity. “We do not sit around our country and look in; we have no idea if Wall Street is about to be attacked,” said Alexander.

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Sunday police arrested 15-year-old Trevon Isaac after his 59-year-old grandmother called 911 and said Isaac had raped her in her sleep. Court documents state the boy’s grandmother said when she woke up Thursday morning “her privates were hurting and she noticed her panties were missing.” She later found them “under her bed and they had been cut.” The woman told police she ”takes medications at night for medical reason and the medications put her to sleep.” The next night she told police she slept on the couch and the woke up to “Isaac thrusting against her” and that he ran into the bathroom yelling “I just touched you.” The woman later called 911 and her son. Her son picked up Isaac and also called police. The victim’s son said Isaac told him, “I cut her panties off while she was in bed” and “I had sex with grandma.” Court records state he also said that he “had sex with grandma on the couch.”

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Jonah Falcon was stopped and frisked by the TSA at the San Francisco International Airport on July 9 because of a bulging package hidden in his pants. But the 41-year-old New Yorker wasn’t packing a dirty bomb, drugs or a Costco-sized tube of toothpaste. The New Yorker has the world’s largest recorded penis. In an exclusive interview with The Huffington Post, Falcon described his hard times with security guards after his extra carry-on became suspect. “I had my ‘stuff’ strapped to the left. I wasn’t erect at the time,” said Falcon, whose penis is 9 inches flaccid, 13.5 inches erect. “One of the guards asked if my pockets were empty and I said, ‘Yes.'” Falcon said he knew that his interview was about to get a lot more personal when he was led through one of the X-ray body scanners and passed a metal detector. “Another guard stopped me and asked me if I had some sort of growth,” Falcon said, laughing. Indeed he did have a growth.

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The Burger King employee involved in the disturbing picture showing someone standing with shoes on a container of shredded lettuce was fired by the owner of the local franchise, the company said in a statement to Fox8.com. Many details of the picture that was posted on 4chan.org, a social networking website, remain unclear, but the anonymous user reportedly posted the picture along with a comment that said, “This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King.” According to a HyperVocal.com report, an aggravated 4chan user tracked the image’s geo-tagging to locate the employee. The photo was tagged back to Ohio. A Burger King spokeswoman would not confirm the precise location the picture was taken.

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A Brooklyn woman pleaded guilty to her role in a fraud ring that embezzled $57 million from a group that helps compensate victims of Nazi persecution. Zlata Blavatnik, a former clerk for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, faces up to 40 years in prison after admitting to her role in the conspiracy that approved nearly 5,000 fraudulent applications in exchange for kickbacks. The 64-year-old pleaded guilty Tuesday.

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Shying away from certain questions, Calitz, who claimed she was raped by her captors, said more would be revealed in a book they were planning to write about their ordeal. In their almost two years in Mogadishu, Somalia’s largest city, the couple said they were moved – blindfolded – about 17 times. Calitz said she bore no grudges: “They were young enough to be my children, I can’t hate them. They don’t know any different.” Pelizzari said some pirates appeared to be friendly, but they had a rule not to speak to the hostages for more than a minute at a time. “Some were ruthless, but others would sneak us a banana or something now and again,” he said. “I don’t know if it was part of their plan.” The couple said their only link to the world – and a source of entertainment – was the oil-drenched newspaper wrapping their meals. “We’d read whatever news we could find and do the cryptic crosswords in our heads,” he said.

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The fast food chain Chick-fil-A has long been suspected of having an anti-gay agenda, and this week, the company’s COO has decidedly come out on the side of the ‘biblical definition of the family unit.’ Dan Cathy, the president of the multimillion-dollar empire said in an interview with the conservative paper Baptist Press that his company is ‘very much supportive of the family,’ but only when it involves heterosexual couples. ‘Well, guilty as charged,’ Cathy responded when asked about Chick-fil-A’s backing of ‘traditional’ families with a husband and wife.

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Eight months ago, Robert Downs, 51, set up a small structure in the woods near the Tujunga Ponds Wildlife Sanctuary in Sunland, Calif. To hide his home from police, Downs, who was previously homeless, sprayed it with camouflage paint and cut down nearby trees, said Johnie Jones, a deputy in the Parks Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The structure, which Downs built with materials he bought at Home Depot, contained four bunk beds built into the walls, tables, shelves and fire extinguishers. Outside were a rock patio, a barbecue grill and more tables. An American flag was draped over Downs’ bed. Downs stood a chance of evading major legal trouble for his hidden house, but sheriff’s deputies also discovered that he cultivated eight marijuana plants outside the structure, a felony because he did not have a permit to do so, Jones said.

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It first became apparent to my parents that something was wrong when I was four or five months old. I began chewing on my tongue while teething. They took me to a paediatrician where I underwent a series of tests. At first they put a cigarette lighter underneath my foot and waited for my skin to blister. Once they saw that I had no response to that then they began running needles up and down my spine. And since I had no response to either of those tests they came to the conclusion that I had what I have – congenital analgesia. By which point, I had chewed off about a quarter of my tongue through teething.

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The program, called Viral Peace, seeks to occupy the virtual space that extremists fill, one thread or Twitter exchange at a time. Shahed Amanullah, a senior technology adviser to the State Department and Viral Peace’s creator, tells Danger Room he wants to use “logic, humor, satire, [and] religious arguments, not just to confront [extremists], but to undermine and demoralize them.” Think of it as strategic trolling, in pursuit of geopolitical pwnage.

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Shares in Facebook continued to slide on Tuesday, after an analyst claimed the dominant social network had seen a modest drop in its userbase. Capstone Investment’s Rory Maher said Mark Zuckerberg’s company suffered a 1.1 per cent fall in US users over the last six months. The number of European Facebookers had also declined, he added. Meanwhile, Facebook’s stock hit a month-long low yesterday finishing the day at $28.09 on Nasdaq, after falling some 8 per cent at the start of the week.

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Modern social scientists, who are little more than unscientific socialists, variously view racism as a cancer, a sin, an aberration, and a mental illness rather than a natural and ubiquitous phenomenon. Ignoring the fact that every culture throughout human history has been ethnocentric, they frame racism as an exclusive product of white supremacy, European colonialism, and predatory palefaced capitalism. They also shellac it with a thick gloppy glaze of moralistic condemnation, depicting it as the worst and most destructive of all possible human instincts. The psychological establishment is well on its way to depicting “sociobiological” as personality disorders rather than natural drives toward self-preservation, which in a bygone era were seen as the epitome of mental health.

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However, the error message sounded as if Facebook was analyzing the contents of the message and deciding what was relevant or not, which would go beyond traditional anti-spam measures and veer into censorship territory. “Wow, does Facebook do sentiment analysis on comments and keeps you from posting negative comments?” Scoble asked on his Facebook page. Facebook’s Error Message Scoble’s “This Comment Can’t Be Posted” pop-up message stated the following: “This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can’t be posted. To avoid having your comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.” There was an “Okay” button to close the error message.

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At the time of this report, Facebook “likes” such as “incest” and PTHC (preteen hardcore pornography) were still available in the website’s search engine. One open group with 145 members, “Incest,” offered the following description of the crowd: “all mom dad sister bro aunt f–kers.” A Facebook user by the name “Bizzy Bones” declared: “I masturbated with my cousin once. She was 15. I was 14.” Several visitors to the page liked the listing and one eagerly asked, “How was ur experience?” Another page under the title “Incest” had 1,527 likes. A fourth had 12,311 likes. A fifth had 2,376 likes. Two more had 403 likes. Meanwhile, WND recently reported 34 more links to the FBI depicting images and videos of child sex abuse in a period of only a few days. As part of a two-month undercover news investigation, WND used alias Facebook profiles and located dozens of child-porn images after “friending” many likely pedophiles and predators who trade thousands of pornographic photos

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With that being said, there is a part of me that believes that Lady Gaga isn’t sincere with her antics and is just doing so because she needs a gimmick to separate herself from the rest of the group. With Prince and Madonna, they weren’t acting crazy because they were trying to be different, they were just extravagant figures who have very unique views on many things so they expressed it in their attire and music. I am pretty sure that they probably look back at it now and figure how crazy they were back then, but at least that is who they were. With Lady Gaga I do not get that same type of vibe as I believe she is just putting on a show rather than really expressing herself. She knows that her antics is what sales records and draws in more twitter followers so she does whatever it takes. That does not make her unique, which just makes her a figure seeking attention. In other words, she comes across as fake to me which really takes away from her appeal.

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Human skin takes on the colour of smoked salmon when it is professionally removed in rectangular shapes from a cadaver. A good yield is about 5500 square centimetres. After being mashed up to remove moisture, some is destined to protect burn victims from life-threatening bacterial infections or, once further refined, for breast reconstructions after cancer. The use of human tissue “has really revolutionised what we can do in breast reconstruction surgery”, explains Dr Ron Israeli, a New York plastic surgeon. “Since we started using it in about 2005, it’s really become a standard technique.” A significant number of recovered tissues are transformed into products whose shelf names give little clue to their actual origin. They are used in the dental and beauty industries, for everything from plumping up lips to smoothing out wrinkles.

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The security of high-end handcuffs depends on a detainee not having access to certain small, precisely-shaped objects. In the age of easy 3D printing and other DIY innovations, that assumption may no longer apply. In a workshop Friday at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York, a German hacker and security consultant who goes by the name “Ray” demonstrated a looming problem for handcuff makers hoping to restrict the distribution of the keys that open their cuffs: With plastic copies he cheaply produced with a laser-cutter and a 3D printer, he was able to open handcuffs built by the German firm Bonowi and the English manufacturer Chubb, both of which attempt to control the distribution of their keys to keep them exclusively in the hands of authorized buyers such as law enforcement.

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The mysterious disc-shaped object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea could be a relic from a giant World War II device placed there by the Nazis to disrupt Soviet submarine navigation. ­The object may be the concrete anchor of the device, which also had to be fitted with stainless steel mesh, Swedish naval officer and warfare history expert Anders Autellus told Swedish newspaper Expressen. It would interfere with submarine radar signals and make them crash. The mesh itself may well have eroded away over the decades, but the images of the object made by the Ocean X team exploring it show what appear to be holes, where it was attached to the foundation, he added.

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In the foreclosure-battered inland stretches of California, local government officials desperate for change are weighing a controversial but inventive way to fix troubled mortgages: Condemn them. Officials from San Bernardino County and two of its cities have formed a local agency to consider the plan. But investors who stand to lose money on their mortgage investments have been quick to register their displeasure.

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It’s relevant to understand that these children have inherited extra genes—that of TWO women and one man—and will be able to pass this extra set of genetic traits to their own offspring. One of the most shocking considerations here is that this was done—repeatedly—even though no one knows what the ramifications of having the genetic traits of three parents might be for the individual, or for their subsequent offspring. Based on what I’ve learned about the genetic engineering of plants, I’m inclined to say the ramifications could potentially be vast, dire, and completely unexpected. As a general, broad-strokes rule, it seems few scientists fond of gene-tinkering have a well-rounded or holistic view of living organisms, opting instead to view the human body as a machine. And as demonstrated with the multi-varied problems that have arisen from genetically engineered foods—from the development of superweeds and superpests, to the creation of a never-before-seen organism

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☛ Many Wall Street executives say wrongdoing is necessary: survey

A quarter of Wall Street executives see wrongdoing as a key to success, according to a survey by whistleblower law firm Labaton Sucharow released on Tuesday. In a survey of 500 senior executives in the United States and the UK, 26 percent of respondents said they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, while 24 percent said they believed financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be successful.

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On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They’d marked the spot “Ground Zero. Population 5” on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them. As we watch, directly overhead, two F-89 jets roar into view, and one of them shoots off a nuclear missile carrying an atomic warhead. They wait. There is a countdown; 18,500 feet above them, the missile is detonated and blows up. Which means, these men intentionally stood directly underneath an exploding 2-kiloton nuclear bomb. One of them, at the key moment (he’s wearing sunglasses), looks up. You have to see this to believe it.

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NSA whistleblower Thomas A. Drake is backing the EFF’s lawsuit over the government’s massive spying program. Drake also had a lot to say about the establishment of a ‘surveillance society’ in America. In a video interview, he said it was ‘soft tyranny. It raises the specter of you’re automatically suspicious until we prove that you’re not. It raises the specter of a universal wiretap, a persistent universal wiretap on every single person, or if not, they can create one.’

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Trolled!

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Currently, large doses of chemotherapy are required when treating certain forms of cancer, resulting in toxic side effects. The chemicals enter the body and work to destroy or shrink the tumor, but also harm vital organs and drastically affect bodily functions. Now, University of Missouri scientists have found a more efficient way of targeting prostate tumors by using gold nanoparticles and a compound found in tea leaves. This new treatment would require doses that are thousands of times smaller than chemotherapy and do not travel through the body inflicting damage to healthy areas. The study is being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Lake County, Florida sheriff’s deputies who failed to identify themselves when knocking on a man’s door at 1:30AM at night immediately shot and killed the homeowner after he allegedly opened his door with a gun in hand. The man who was murdered, 26-year-old Andrew Lee Scott, was described by neighbors as a good person and “very nice guy.” The deputies realized later they got the wrong house, but for good measure they searched the man’s apartment and found drugs, which apparently justifies their murdering him randomly. The police are entirely unapologetic. Lt. John Herrell said of the incident, “The bottom line is, you point a gun at a deputy sheriff or police office, you’re going to get shot.” For police who refuse to identify themselves to point their guns at you is A-OK, yet for you to do the same in self-defense is grounds for summary execution.

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What makes this new legislation shocking is that we have seen the US government repeatedly use the “State Secrets” and the “National InSecurity card to suspend the Constitution at will to commit a wide variety of heinous activities from torture and indefinite detention without trial to outright forced drugging of prisoners and even repeated assassination by the government, of people including US citizens, which is now being done on the direction of the United States’ first even assassination czar. Keeping that in mind the fact that lawmakers are now trying to go after reporters that “publish government secrets” unequivocally amounts to an outright ban of any and all reporting on government corruption PERIOD because at the end of the day the corrupt and illegal activities conducted by government officials are done in secret in the first place.

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Five years ago a composer created music for use in a one-off anti-piracy video. However, without his permission it was used time and again on dozens of commercial DVDs such as Harry Potter. Even in the wake of a huge controversy over “corrupt” and “mafia-like” practices, the local music rights group that got involved in the case failed to pay him the money he was owed. The case went to court and this week the music rights group lost.

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Most girls as young as 6 are already beginning to think of themselves as sex objects, according to a new study of elementary school-age kids in the Midwest. Researchers have shown in the past that women and teens think of themselves in sexually objectified terms, but the new study is the first to identify self-sexualization in young girls. The study, published online July 6 in the journal Sex Roles, also identified factors that protect girls from objectifying themselves.

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Two Harvard engineers are planning to spray thousands of tonnes of sun-reflecting chemical particles into the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet, using a balloon flying 80,000 feet over Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The field experiment in solar geoengineering aims to ultimately create a technology to replicate the observed effects of volcanoes that spew sulphates into the stratosphere, using sulphate aerosols to bounce sunlight back to space and decrease the temperature of the Earth. David Keith, one of the investigators, has argued that solar geoengineering could be an inexpensive method to slow down global warming, but other scientists warn that it could have unpredictable, disastrous consequences for the Earth’s weather systems and food supplies. Environmental groups fear that the push to make geoengineering a “plan B” for climate change will undermine efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

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“What really frightens me is not just the disastrous nature of Citizens United, but the whole trend that we are seeing lately, economically, of moving this country toward an oligarchic form of government,” he said. “What you have right now is incredibly unequal distribution of wealth and income… the Walton family of Walmart itself owns more wealth — one family — than the bottom 40 percent of the American people.” “You’ve got that reality out there, and then what’s happening now — what Citizens United is about — is these guys are not content to own the economy, to own the wealth of America, they now want to own lock, stock and barrel the political process as well.” The DISCLOSE Act would have required outside campaign groups to disclose those who contribute $10,000 or more. But it failed to move forward on Tuesday after Senate Republicans unanimously voted against it.

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More than 40 poles have been bent, buckled or broken in the past 18 months in one area of south Auckland, New Zealand, it is claimed. The signs, bearing legally required notices such as parking restrictions, are thought to have cost ratepayers thousands of dollars to replace. “Prostitutes use these street sign poles as dancing poles,” said Donna Lee, an elected member of the city council’s Otara-Papatoetoe Local Board. “The poles are part of their soliciting equipment and they often snap them. “Some of the prostitutes are big, strong people.”

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People left the “massive house party” and went about two miles to the Walmart, where more shots were fired about 11:20 p.m., according to a second police report. Men and women, most appearing to be teens on the YouTube video, threw produce around as they crowded into the store. The three-minute video shows people riding shopping carts and mugging for the camera in what apparently lasted several minutes. Gee said snacks and sodas were stolen, but no one was hurt and damage was minimal. A store security scanner also was damaged as everybody fled, the police report said. No identifiable Walmart employees are seen during the video. The gunshots were fired into the air outside the store, but no cars or people were hit, the report said. Flash mobs are usually a group of people who dance or sing together in a public place, captured on social media. But so-called “flash robs” like this one are a recent phenomena.

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A horrifying video of a woman being pounced upon by roughly twenty men after she left a bar in India has caused international outrage. In it, the woman is seemingly stripped, molested, and even burned with cigarettes as she screams for help for roughly thirty minutes, to no avail. Thanks Jasmine

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☛ Cannibal cult arrests in Papua New Guinea

Police in remote Papua New Guinea have arrested members of an alleged cannibal cult accused of killing at least seven people, eating their brains raw and making soup from their penises, a report said Friday. The 29 people were part of a 1,000-strong group formed to combat errant sorcerers who The National newspaper said had begun charging exorbitant fees. The cost of a witch doctor revealing a cause of death or casting out an evil spirit was usually 1000 kina ($472) cash, plus a pig and a bag of rice, but some were also demanding sex as payment. “It’s against our traditional ethics and morals for a sorcerer to have intercourse with a man’s wife or teenage daughter,” said one local cult leader in the Tangi area, inland from Madang province on PNG’s northeast coast.

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“I make a point of staying right at the edge of poverty. I don’t have a pair of pants without a hole in them, and the only pair of boots I have are on my feet. I don’t mess around with unnecessary stuff, so I don’t need much money. I believe it’s meant to be that way. There’s a ‘struggle’ you have to go through, and if you make a lot of money it doesn’t make the ‘struggle’ go away. It just makes it more complicated. If you keep poor, the struggle is simple. “ ~Von Dutch

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They are surely the most horrifying offshoot of modern technology – nuclear warheads which can smite hundreds of thousands of people dead within seconds, and leave lasting scars on a landscape for generations. And while most of us will have seen archive footage of nuclear explosions before, one thing we are unlikely to have heard is their sound. For, according to one expert, most films we see of a nuclear blast use stock ‘explosion’ sound effects for the bang – and audio footage is few and far between. But Alex Wellerstein, an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics, has shared a unigue video of a blast during America’s testing of nukes in the Yucca Mountain area of Nevada during the 1950s.

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No longer is it enough for Washington to simply use, cooperate with, or listen to private communications. Now the president claims the authority to order all of it seized– as in nationalized under federal control. In a sense, however, this sweeping new order is only somewhat unprecedented, at least in the Bush-Obama era of executive power. Potential seizure of communications infrastructure simply folds into a laundry list of resources that Obama declared authority to seize and manage in another recent Executive Order:

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Police in Papua New Guinea have unearthed a ‘cannibal cult’ in the jungle thought to be responsible for the murders of seven suspected witch doctors. The 29 cult members allegedly ate their victims’ brains raw and made soup from their penises, according to police officials. Madang Police Commander Anthony Wagambie said: “They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong; they admit what they’ve done openly.” Wagambie said the suspected killers believed their victims practiced “sanguma”, or sorcery, and had allegedly been extorting money and demanding sex from poverty-stricken villagers for supernatural services. The cult members are thought to have eaten the witch doctors’ organs in the belief that they would attain supernatural powers and become ‘bulletproof’.

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Dr. Twana Sparks, an ENT (Ears, Nose and Throat) surgeon, had just finished doing a tympanoplasty with mastoidectomy, a surgical procedure to correct a middle ear problem. The patient was a middle-thirties Hispanic man who lay stretched out before her on the operating table, still under anesthesia. After applying a dressing to the surgical site, Dr. Sparks, who was also the hospital chief of staff, reached inside the patient’s boxer shorts without wearing gloves, fished out his penis and pointed it at the ceiling. She observed fluid filled vesicles on the side of the shaft, indicating a sexually transmitted disease, and shouted “Oh Gross!” She then slapped the head of his penis three times, saying “Bad boy, bad boy, bad boy!” with each strike, as her all female operating team erupted in laughter.

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In 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated widespread incidents of power thefts in Puerto Rico believed to be related to smart meter deployment. The FBI believed that former employees of the meter manufacturer and employees of the utility company were tampering with the meters charging between $300 to $1,000 to reprogram residential meters and $3,000 to reprogram commercial meters. The perpetrators were said to have hacked into the smart meters using an optical converter device connected to a laptop, allowing smart meters to connect with the computer. The hackers were able to change the settings for recording power consumptions using software available on the internet after making a connection. This method does not require the removal, alteration or disassembly of the meter.

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No music fan in his or her right mind would pull the plug on the legendary Bruce Springsteen and Sir Paul McCartney, but that’s exactly what London police did late Saturday night. Springsteen was at the tail end of a three-hour long performance in London’s Hyde Park when he brought the ex-Beatle onto the stage to do a couple of songs together. The pair went beyond the park’s 10:30 p.m. curfew by about half an hour, prompting police to cut off the juice.

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Jacqueline established The Snuggery because she believes in the healing power of touch. The Snuggery is a place to take a break from the hustle and bustle of life and focus on the simple restorative pleasure of touch. Though science has unquestionably supported the psychological and physical benefits of non-sexual touch, Americans distinctly lack it. It’s time for change. At The Snuggery, Jacqueline provides individuals with private snuggling sessions. She aims to make the world a gentler place, one snuggle at a time.

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16 escape stories with only one that makes sense The blind Chinese dissident, Chen Guangcheng has finally “escaped” the “brutal” treatment of the Chinese “regime” and landed in the “free” world. The world – in particular the American media – called this a human rights win for America.

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Now, however, the proof is starting to pile up. The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.

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Beaver and two other friends buy shirts with monsters on the front, each more gruesome than the next. Beaver is the only one who tricks his parents and wears his new sweatshirt to school. However, the principal doesn’t like it and an angry Ward comes to pick up Beaver.

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Shuffling along the road, holding tightly onto her grandmother’s hand, every step three-year-old Yu Yu takes is painful. The toddler suffers from an undiagnosed condition which causes her feet to grow at an alarmingly rapid rate. The youngster is forced to walk barefoot as her poverty-stricken family are unable to afford shoes big enough for her. Yu Yu’s feet are constantly swollen and heavy, making moving around extremely difficult.

Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world’s oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany. A barrage of tests proves the marijuana possessed potent psychoactive properties and casts doubt on the theory that the ancients only grew the plant for hemp in order to make clothing, rope and other objects. They apparently were getting high too.

Filmmakers, fans, activists, artists, and media makers have been reediting television, movies, and news media for critical and political purposes since almost the very beginning of moving pictures. Over the past century, this subversive form of populist remixing has been called many things, including appropriation art, détournement, media jamming, found footage, avant-garde film, television hacking, telejusting, political remix, scratch video, vidding, outsider art, antiart, and even cultural terrorism. The politically oriented mashup video subgenre has its roots in the rich and diverse history of left-leaning, often deeply antiauthoritarian, creative traditions. These transformative works, by their very nature, are suspicious of and challenge political, corporate, media, and social power structures. They focus on a wide array of issues, including race, gender, sexuality, and economics, in addition to more overtly political topics of government, public policy, and warfare.

A study of nearly 4,000 teenagers published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, shows that secondary school children who take methamphetamine (speed) and MDMA (ecstasy) appear to be prone to depression later on. The study results proved to be independent of previous bouts of depressive symptoms or other drug use. Speed and ecstasy first gained popularity amongst clubbers and people in the rave scene. However, both drugs have also become increasingly popular in the general population, such as secondary school children, who, according to the researchers, often take both drugs at the same time.

Cocaine may speed up the aging of the brain, according to new research that finds that people who are addicted to the drug lose twice the brain volume each year as non-drug users. As the brain ages, it inevitably loses gray matter, the part of brain tissue made up of neuron cell bodies. Loss of gray matter is linked with many of the signs of old age, including memory problems and other declining cognitive abilities, said study researcher Karen Ersche, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. Middle-age cocaine-dependent people show many of the signs of aging, including cognitive decline, Ersche told LiveScience. To look at the underlying cause, she and her colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure gray matter volume in 60 adults with cocaine dependence and 60 adults without substance-use troubles who were similar to the cocaine-abusing volunteers in age, gender and verbal IQ.

A friend of a man accused of stabbing his mother to death reports the alleged stabber, may have been on a hallucinogenic, called, ‘Psychedelic DMT’. Twenty-two year-old William Walsh remains in jail, charged with stabbing his mother to death at their home over the weekend. DMT is a very expensive illegal drug, hard to find on the streets. “You shouldnt take anything you wont be able to control,” said Brian Chambers with the Memphis Division of the US Drug Enforcement Agency. According to Chambers, Psychedelic DMT is such a powerful drug, it drives people under the influence to do things they wouldn’t normally do. “They start hearing things, they get paranoid, they start seeing things that aren’t there.” expressed Chambers. Powerful, vivid hallucinations aren’t the only side effects. The crystal that’s crushed and then, snorted, smoked or shot up, can cause users to become short of breath, pass out, even die.

A 30-year-old woman who died suddenly in 2010 drank too much Coca-Cola says her partner. Natasha Marie Harris, a mother of eight, died in February 2010 from a cardiac arrest, and her partner Christopher Hodgkinson told an inquest into her death yesterday that she drank at least 10 litres a day, the Otago Daily Times reports. When he found out in 2011 Coke could be the cause, he was irate and made threats to Coca-Cola. Medical records said Ms Harris died of a cardiac arrhythmia, which a doctor in court yesterday said could have been caused by excessive consumption of a sugary drink. Dr Dan Mornin said the consumption can cause severe hypokalemia, a lack of potassium in the blood which could lead to cardiac arrythmias. But Mr Hodgkinson said he had no idea a soft drink like Coca-Cola could kill her at the time. He said she drank it first and last thing each day and throughout the day, and vomited regularly.

Dangerous currents swirl around Sotobanari island, which has not a drop of natural water, and local fishermen rarely land there. But 76-year-old Masafumi Nagasaki has made this kidney-shaped island in Japan’s tropical Okinawa prefecture his retirement home, with an unusual dress code: nothing at all. Naked, he braves lashing typhoons and biting insects as a hermit in the buff. “I don’t do what society tells me, but I do follow the rules of the natural world. You can’t beat nature so you just have to obey it completely,” he said. “That’s what I learned when I came here, and that’s probably why I get by so well.” The wiry Nagasaki, his skin leathered by the sun of two decades on the island, worked briefly as a photographer before spending years on the murkier side of the entertainment industry. When retirement came, he wanted to get far away from it all. He chose Sotobanari, which is roughly a 1,000 meters across and means “Outer Distant island” in the local dialect.

The past few months have seen dozens of students and other protesters charged with major offences – particularly ‘violent disorder’, which carries with it a maximum five-year sentence. Many people, often in their teens and early twenties, have faced crown court trials and been sent to jail for the flimsiest of reasons – throwing a lightweight placard stick, for example – and their lives have been seriously compromised by the stress and humiliation of a trial (many of which take place over a year after the protest) and the shock of prison. At the same time, policing at protests has been heavy-handed, including the use of kettling, horse charges and batons, and police are pushing for ever more resources (water cannon, rubber bullets) to ‘control’ protesters.

The real grotesqueness isn’t in infantry soldiers taking a few war trophies. No, it’s the idea that’s been sold to the American public that war can be sterile. It’s the idea that 18-year-olds who have been ordered to kill people will never play with the body parts afterward. In this sterile world of war – one undoubtedly sold to the American public to ease their comfort with its perpetual existence – missiles are so precise they can avoid collateral damage, drones can narrow in on specific terrorist targets from the sky, and wars need to be neither bought nor paid for. Or something like that. The unfortunate reality is that war is messy. Missiles hit the wrong targets all the time. Drones accidentally kill women and children. And when 18-year-old infantry soldiers get their first confirmed kill, they high-five, cheer and take a photo.

This blog is by no means an advocate for the sale or purchase of illegal drugs. It is meant solely to provide a brief archive of a complex market and product that can often be dangerous. We believe strongly in the philosophy of HARM REDUCTION among recreational drug users and addicts alike. Information and education saves lives. Please be careful, everyone!

Location services company Navizon has a new system, called Navizon I.T.S., that could allow tracking of visitors in malls, museums, offices, factories, secured areas and just about any other indoor space. It could be used to examine patterns of foot traffic in retail spaces, assure that a museum is empty of visitors at closing time, or even to pinpoint the location of any individual registered with the system. But let’s set all that aside for a minute while we freak out about the privacy implications. Most of us leave Wi-Fi on by default, in part because our phones chastise us when we don’t. (Triangulation by Wi-Fi hotspots is important for making location services more accurate.) But you probably didn’t realize that, using proprietary new “nodes” from Navizon, any device with an active Wi-Fi radio can be seen by a system like Navizon’s.

A family outing to an Olive Garden in Indianapolis turned into a brief horror show this week after the restaurant accidentally served their 10-year-old son an alcoholic drink. The boy was taken to the hospital on Thursday. The child–who has not been indenified– had ordered a non-alcoholic Frullato Smoothie, but the waitress mistakenly brought him a 4-ounce cocktail, WISH-TV reported. After realizing the error, the waitress told the restaurant’s management, which informed the boy’s parents. The parents took their son to a local hospital, where tests revealed alcohol in his system. A police officer at the hospital described the boy as “alert” but “shaken up,” according to the local television station.

President Barack Obama is the drug brand of choice for many dealers. Since his election in 2008, the Commander-in-Chief’s name and face has been slapped on a wide variety of contraband products including ecstasy pills, LSD tabs, heroin baggies and a popular strain of medical marijuana.

Sure, it’s not that shocking that a few of these famous writers and actors dropped acid back in the day. But we were surprised to find out how some athletes, scientists and groundbreaking innovators used LSD and how profoundly it affected them personally and professionally. Watch the video about to learn about how some of our most culturally prolific leaders and artists used the psychedelic drug.

This is how I — a journalism graduate student with no background in forensics — became certified as a “Forensic Consultant” by one of the field’s largest professional groups. One afternoon early last year, I punched in my credit card information, paid $495 to the American College of Forensic Examiners International Inc. and registered for an online course. After about 90 minutes of video instruction, I took an exam on the institute’s web site, answering 100multiple choice questions, aided by several ACFEI study packets. As soon as I finished the test, a screen popped up saying that I had passed, earning me an impressive-sounding credential that could help establish my qualifications to be an expert witness in criminal and civil trials. For another $50, ACFEI mailed me a white lab coat after sending my certificate.

✪ A troubling trend in teens drinking hand sanitizer

The liquid hand sanitizer is 62% ethyl alcohol and makes a 120-proof liquid. A few drinks can cause a person’s speech to slur and stomach to burn, and make people so drunk that they have to be monitored in the emergency room. Doctors said this is the latest over-the-counter product that teenagers have adapted for a quick high. Teenagers have done the same with mouthwash, cough syrup and even vanilla extract. “Over the years, they have ingested all sorts of things,” said Helen Arbogast, injury prevention coordinator in the trauma program at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “Cough syrup had reached a very sexy point where young people were using it…. We want to be sure this doesn’t take on the same trend.”

The best way to drink hand sanitizer is straight, like whisky, and down it “like a shot,” explains Tyler, a Grade 10 student who lives in Toronto. Undiluted, the alcohol-based liquid tastes a little like “vodka and bug spray,” he adds.

Chancellor Katehi, on her part, “thought she made it clear” that when police ordered the students to leave, they were (a) not to wear riot gear into the camp, (b) not to carry weapons of any kind into the camp, (c) were not to use force of any kind against the students, and (d) were not to make any arrests. But all that anybody else on that conference call heard her say out loud was “I don’t want another situation like they just had at Berkeley,” and Chief Spicuzza interpreted that as “no swinging of clubs.” Chief Spicuzza “thought she made it clear” more than once that no riot gear was to be worn and no clubs or pepper sprayers were to be carried. What Lieutenant Pike said back to her, each time, was, “Well, I hear you say that you don’t want us to, but we’re going to.” And they did, including that now-infamous Mk-9 military-grade riot-control pepper sprayer that he used. Oh, funny thing about that particular model of pepper-sprayer? It’s illegal for California cops to possess or use.

“This is the only court in the United States where you can plead guilty and still be given the death penalty, and it’s just another sign that the system is not set up to give anyone a trial it’s set up to give someone what appears to be a fair trial with a predetermined result,” Broyles said.* “It’s pretty clear to me that the public has lost interest in these issues,” Richard Kammen, a death penalty expert representing accused USS Cole attack plotter Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, told TPM. “There’s certainly a lot more interest in Trayvon Martin, for example, than there is in any of the military commissions, with the exception being the arraignment for the 9/11 people. But the day-to-day stuff, which is really quite important, has drifted off peoples’ consciences.” Kammen called the reforms instituted by the Obama administration in 2009 “quite superficial” and said there are “huge, huge problems” in the military commissions system.

Watching pornography would seem to be a vision-intensive task. But new research finds that looking at erotic movies can actually quiet the part of the brain that processes visual stimuli. Most of the time, watching movies or conducting any other visual task sends extra blood flow to this brain region. Not so when the movies are explicit, the researchers found. Instead, the brain seems to shunt blood — and therefore energy — elsewhere, perhaps to regions of the brain responsible for sexual arousal. Turns out, the brain may not need to take in all the visual details of a sex scene, said study researcher Gert Holstege, a uroneurologist at the University of Groningen Medical Center in the Netherlands.

From the archives of British Pathé, a look at Burgess Hill, a one-of-a-kind British boarding school in which nothing was forbidden and students were “allowed to find out for themselves whether conventions are good or bad.” In other words, plenty of cigarette smoking, mod styles, R&B; dancing, abstract painting, and motorbike races. Based on the revolutionary idea that kids should be happy: Burgess Hill was a progressive boarding school in Hertfordshire, England in the 1960s. Run by a Cambridge graduate, it allowed the kids to do what ever they liked! We can’t quite work out whether this is the best or worst school in the world. Would actually be interesting to know what became of these kids.

And it was only when the police came knocking one morning that Jamie’s secret life was exposed. After identifying that someone in the house was accessing child porn, they took Jamie’s laptop away for examination. Jamie is only 13 — and he still hasn’t even kissed a girl, let alone had sex. Though he is only a child himself, the result is that he has been put on the Sex Offender Register, blighting his life for the foreseeable future. Even with intensive therapy, Jamie still suffers from deep shame — ‘as if it is written across my forehead’ — which has led him to fear he will never be able to form a healthy relationship with a woman.

✪ Israel’s top general says Iran unlikely to make bomb

Israel’s military chief said he does not believe Iran will decide to build an atomic bomb and called its leaders “very rational” – comments that clashed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assessment. Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz’s remarks, in an interview published on Wednesday in the left-wing Haaretz newspaper, drew little attention in Israel on its annual remembrance day for fallen soldiers, when political discourse is suspended. But they will add fuel to an internal debate on the prospects of Iran weaponizing its uranium enrichment program and the wisdom and risks of any Israeli military strike to try to prevent Tehran from becoming a nuclear power.

In order to gain stronger public perception of new crowd control technology, the US miltary has been showcasing a new weapon dubbed the “pain ray”. The system cost more than $120m developing the technology and was deployed in Afghanistan two years ago

A Bloomington man was attacked and knocked to the ground by a man who wanted to steal his bucket of fried chicken, police said. A 22-year-old man was walking home in the 500 block of South Park Ridge Road just before 1 a.m. Wednesday when he was confronted, police said. Sean M. Nelson, 24, demanded the man give him his bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and began slapping and punching him when he refused, police said. The victim suffered a chipped tooth, red marks on his neck and a torn shirt, police said.

A father has been jailed for setting up a hidden camera in the bathroom where his daughters showered. The Adelaide District Court heard the 50-year-old man had developed an obsession with child pornography which he kept hidden from his family. Police raided his Adelaide home last June and seized more than 2,000 pornographic files from his computer. They also found edited movies of naked teenage girls which had been filmed by a small camera on a storage shelf in the family bathroom. The court heard the youngest daughter could be identified clothed in one of the videos but the naked girls could not be identified. Judge Geoffrey Muecke said the man denied those filmed were his daughters, but said they were of two of his daughter’s friends, aged 14 and 15.

A four-year-old Saudi boy shot his father in the head while playing with his gun at their house, reportedly after his parent refused to buy him a PlayStation video game console. ­After the boy and his father returned home from the shop, the man, in his forties, put down his pistol while taking off his shirt. He did not notice that his son had grabbed his gun and was playing with it before putting his little finger on the trigger. The father died instantly. Some media reports however suggest the death was an accident, although Arabic media has already labeled the boy the youngest killer in Saudi Arabia.

Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives – for up to six hours after their death. The controversial new law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament. It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women’s rights of getting education and employment. Thanks Adam Tetzloff

Sergeant Gary Stein will be kicked out of the Marines for Facebook comments he made criticizing President Obama on a page used by Marine meteorologists. He’ll get an other-than-honorable discharge and lose most of his benefits, three months before his contract would have been completed. “I’m having a hard time seeing how 15 words on Facebook could have ruined my nine-year career,” he said. Stein posted, “Screw Obama and I will not follow all orders from him.” Service members are allowed to criticize political candidates, but not as representatives of the Armed Forces.

Four current and former Transportation Security Administration screeners have been arrested and face charges of taking bribes and looking the other way while suitcases filled with cocaine, methamphetamine or marijuana passed through X-ray machines at Los Angeles International Airport, federal authorities announced Wednesday. The TSA screeners, who were arrested Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, allegedly received up to $2,400 in cash bribes in exchange for allowing large drug shipments to pass through checkpoints in what the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles called a “significant breakdown” of security.

President George Bush, President Barack Obama, and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney all work for the exact same handful of corporate-financier interests. While they vary in how they dress up their methods of carrying out what is essentially a singular agenda, there is glaring continuity from one administration to the next in a process analogous to a corporate spokesman presenting the agenda of the board of directors. Changing spokesmen doesn’t change the agenda of the board of directors. While the corporate media focuses on non-issues, and political pundits accentuate petty political rivalries between the “left” and the “right,” a look deeper into presidential cabinets and the authors of domestic and foreign policy reveals just how accurate this analogy is and who sits on the “board of directors.”

Even by the standards of New Agey, cult-friendly LA, Zeena Schreck had a bizarre and abusive upbringing at the hands of parents who made the devil more famous than he’s ever been. Zeena is the daughter of Church of Satan (CoS) founders Anton LaVey and Diane Hegarty, as well as the recipient of its first baptism. By 13, she had been completely indoctrinated by the CoS, received death threats regularly, and was pregnant. She went on to be ordained the CoS’s high priestess and spokesperson just as Reagan-era yuppies began to completely freak over tales of children being sacrificed in the woods by her congregation. Against all odds, Zeena managed to rebel against the self-absorbed zealots who raised her and left the church in 1990 with her husband, Nikolas Schreck. In 2002, the couple founded the Sethian Liberation Movement, a religious body that allows people to learn and practice magic without answering to an oppressive sect and helps free ex-cult members from their troubled pasts.

Locked in frozen vaults on Antarctica and Greenland, a lost world of ancient creatures awaits another chance at life. Like a time-capsule from the distant past, the polar ice sheets offer a glimpse of tiny organisms that may have been trapped there longer than modern humans have walked the planet, biding their time until conditions change and set them free again. With that ice melting at an alarming rate, those conditions could soon be at hand. Masses of bacteria and other microbes – some of which the world hasn’t seen since the Middle Pleistocene, a previous period of major climate change about 750,000 years ago – will make their way back into the environment. Once thought to be too harsh and inhospitable to support any living thing, the ice sheets are now known to be a gigantic reservoir of microbial life. Altogether, the biomass of microbial cells in and beneath the ice sheet may amount to more than 1,000 times that of all the humans on Earth.

But I’m wondering if focusing on the ew-gross aspects of “lean, finely textured beef” (as the industry calls it) doesn’t miss the bigger picture, which is that the meat industry’s very business model is deeply gross. Even if pink slime is purged from the face of the earth, the system that produces our meat and related products (eggs, milk) won’t be fundamentally changed. A while back, I identified something about meat production that’s “even grosser than pink slime”—proposed new rules that would privatize inspection at poultry slaughterhouses while dramatically speeding up kill lines. Here are four more.

‘The unidentified flying object, which bears no resemblance to anything ever spotted near the Sun, somehow manages to withstand the blazing heat thrown off by solar flare activity and the incredibly high temperatures emanating from nuclear fusion generated on the surface of the star. What is it?’ asked the site. UFO fans on YouTube have been highly enthusiastic about the object, with many claiming it as a definite ‘spot’. SOHO, the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory, is a satellite built to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer corona and the solar wind.

UFO Near The Sun

The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that would make it mandatory for all new cars in the United States to include black box data recorders from the year 2015, and would (among many other provisions) permit the IRS to confiscate one’s passport on the suspicion of owing taxes. SB 1813, called the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP 21), passed in the Senate quite easily after heavy promotion from Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif., left). The bill is scheduled for a vote in the House, where Republicans are hoping to add a Keystone XL Pipeline provision before passage.

The discovery of what Chechen scientists believe to be dinosaur eggs is causing a ruckus among paleontologists. The sphere-like fossils were found on a construction site and the area has become a magnet for locals eager to look at the ‘dinos’. Workmen building a new road were blacking through a hillside near the Chechen border with Georgia when they came across what geologists described as a clutch of 60 million year old “eggs”.

But there is another factor that might be playing a role in the increasing rates of the disorder, one that has escaped attention: the military’s use of stimulant medications, like Ritalin and Adderall, in our troops. There has been a significant increase in the use of stimulant medication. Documents that I obtained in late 2010 through the Freedom of Information Act, and have recently analyzed, show that annual spending on stimulants jumped to $39 million in 2010 from $7.5 million in 2001 — more than a fivefold increase. Additional data provided by Tricare Management Activity, the arm of the Department of Defense that manages health care services for the military, reveals that the number of Ritalin and Adderall prescriptions written for active-duty service members increased by nearly 1,000 percent in five years, to 32,000 from 3,000.

Shakespeare said, “a rose by another other name would smell as sweet.” The residents in a small village in Austria with the unfortunate name of Fucking think a place that’s called any other other name would get less offensive treatment. Moves are now afoot to change the village name to something less distinctive. “The only problem is that we need all of the Fucking residents to agree to the name change,” Mayor Franz Meindl said –speaking literally, you can assume, and not colloquially, in a recent TV interview. “Everyone needs to agree for it to happen.”

✪ Penis removal not needed for man to become woman: Ontario tribunal

Under current law, even if a man transitioning to a woman had undergone hormone therapy, grown a pair of breasts and developed a higher-pitched voice, they are barred from changing their sex without written proof of a vagina. “Even though you could be presenting as a female full-time, you couldn’t get your birth certificate changed to show you as female unless you had the male bits lopped off,” said Kay Lockhart, a woman-in-transition based in Ottawa.

“I found 11 films showing my wife in indecent scenes with her lover….it was the first time I watched a porno film and I did this just out of curiosity,” Ramadan told Egyptian newspapers at his house in the northeastern province of Dakhalia. “She first denied it and accused me of being insane before I faced her with the films…she then confessed to be still in love with her boyfriend, saying he is as young as her and that I am an old man.” Ramadan said he had been happy during his marriage life until he logged on to that website. Newspapers did not say whether he decided to divorce her.

Plenty of cop “beat downs” can be found online, but how often does the officer who stops others from handing out the beating get fired for it? That’s exactly what’s happening to Officer Regina Tasca in the Bogota Police Department. Tasca’s dashboard camera captured her as she attempted to stop two officers from beating an emotionally disturbed young man. Just days after the incident, she was told she was being suspended with pay. A year later, her trial is about to begin as the Bogota PD seeks to fire her.

Here’s a simple math equation: T-shirts + abortion = controversy. Tensions ran high on Monday, after T-shirts reading “I had an abortion” were sold on the University of North Carolina Wilmington campus, WECT reports . The shirts were on sale as part of a book signing and discussion lead by abortion rights advocate, Jennifer Baumgardner. The shirts are meant to help destigmatize abortion and help people talk about their experience, according to WWAY. A few students protested the shirts by wearing some of their own that said, “I haven’t killed a baby.”

Students as young as 11 years old would be tested for use of marijuana, pills, cocaine and heroin under a proposal by a North Port charter school that wants to institute the region’s most aggressive student testing program.

“A host of previous studies have routinely shown that individuals with body piercings or tattoos are more likely to engage in risky behavior than non-pierced or non-tattooed people,” corresponding author Nicolas Gueguen, a professor of social behavior at the University of Southern Brittany, said in a journal news release. These risky behaviors include unprotected sex, fighting, theft and drinking. Educators, parents and doctors should consider tattoos and piercings as potential signs of drinking and use them to begin a conversation about alcohol use and other risky behaviors, Gueguen suggested.

Though a variety of companies today serve alcohol to employees, it’s still ad agencies who hold highest the gin-soaked torch. The ranks of liquor-serving firms have recently included J. Walter Thompson, BBDO, TBWA/Chiat/Day, Grey, and Mindshare. In New York, J. Walter Thompson has in its offices a 50-foot-long bar with pedestal stools that would put many a commercial bar to shame. “Yes, we have a bar,” says a spokesperson, “and it is frequently accessed. We think it incentivizes and enthuses employees. It’s generally used for off-hours consumption, but that’s not to say there isn’t on-hours consumption as well.”

Infographic

In the realm of private fantasy, the allure of sexual submission, even in its extremes, is remarkably widespread. An analysis of 20 studies published in Psychology Today estimates that between 31 percent and 57 percent of women entertain fantasies where they are forced to have sex. “Rape fantasies are a place where politics and Eros meet, uneasily,” says Daniel Bergner, who is working on a book on female desire to be published next year. “It is where what we say and what is stand next to each other, mismatched.” The researchers and psychologists he talked to for his 2009 New York Times article, “What Do Women Want?” often seemed reluctant to use the phrase “rape fantasy,” and in scholarly pieces, the idea makes even the chroniclers of these fantasies extremely nervous and apologetic. Even though fantasies are something that, by definition, one can’t control, they seem to be saying something about modern women that nearly everyone wishes wasn’t said.

The former heavyweight champion said that back in 2009 he was in a hotel room with seven prostitutes, a morphine drip in his arm, a pile of cocaine and a bottle of cognac when he began to feel paranoid. Convinced the women were trying to steal from him he started beating them up and threw them out – to stop them from ‘taking his soul’. Tyson said: ‘That’s when I realised it wasn’t just demons – it was the devil himself. ‘It was the lowest point of a very low life, but it was my own knockout punch to clean up life, get whole, get well – and I haven’t done anything in three years now.

The agencies launched an investigation earlier this month when a shipment from Brazil was intercepted at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. The packages, which police report were destined for Richardson’s apartment in Picton, contained drugs known as dimethyltryptamine, a hallucinogen more commonly referred to as DMT, which is a natural compound found in many plants and shrubs. Prince Edward OPP officers assisted with a search warrant at Richardson’s apartment and seized an additional 40 kilograms of the drug. Combined with the packages seized at the airport, police confiscated a total of 120 kgs. Of the illegal drug. This translates to an estimated street value of $68,750 and equals approximately 13,750 hits of the drug, police report.

✪ Tazered man high on LSD dies in police custody, family seeks answers

However, his friend Amanda Nazarao said she and Salgado were on LSD when police responded to a West Miami neighborhood, early Friday morning. Salgado was reportedly naked and behaving in a strange manner. When police arrived at the scene, they Tasered the 21-year-old and restrained him. “They had no reason to beat him, they had no reason to Taser him. He was naked, he had no weapon on him, he wasn’t a threat to them,” Nazarao said. Miami-Dade Police released the following statement: “Upon the officers’ arrival, the male who was later identified as George Salgado became aggressive and violent towards the officers and they utilized their electronic control device.” The 21-year-old was transported to Larkin Hospital, where he later died. Nazarao said, “He looked over. He was like, ‘I just want to tell you guys that I love you all,’ and that’s the last thing he said.”

On a night the team curtailed beer sales in the upper deck, the Blue Jays also ejected a spectator dressed as a marijuana leaf.

When more than 400 25-years-old adults were interviewed, some showed signs of alcohol use problems, but their problems didn’t correlate to self-reported feelings of immaturity. When surveyed again four years later at age 29 and then again at age 35, subjects expressed different sentiments: individuals who showed signs of alcohol abuse or dependence also self-reported feeling immature for their age. “We interpreted our findings to suggest that, at 25, drinking is more culturally acceptable,” Winograd said. “Young adults are out at the bars with their friends and drinking is a bonding experience. They also view blacking out, vomiting and drunk driving as more acceptable because peers are behaving similarly. “But by 29, when many of their peers have settled down, individuals who still drink heavily may start to view themselves as ‘Peter Pans’ of partying, who never fully matured,” Winograd said.

Federal authorities have arrested eight men accused of distributing more than $1 million worth of LSD, ecstasy, and other narcotics with an online storefront that used the TOR anonymity service to mask their Internet addresses. “The Farmer’s Market,” as the online store was called, was like an Amazon for consumers of controlled substances, according to a 66-page indictment unsealed on Monday. It offered online forums, Web-based order forms, customer service, and at least four methods of payment, including PayPal and Western Union. From January 2007 to October 2009, it processed some 5,256 orders valued at $1.04 million. The site catered to about 3,000 customers in 35 countries, including the United States.

D.H. Peligro may hail from the wrong side of the segregated St. Louis tracks but after becoming the drummer of the Dead Kennedys and making his way into the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he has seen much of the world—including the dark side of addiction. Two years after a nasty relapse, Peligro is back with a new band (catch them at the Viper Room this Sunday night). He’s also now ready to tell the world what it’s like to be punk, black, and trying to hide a drug habit from Anthony Kiedis.

A smart-mouthed junkie/loser known as J.J. (George Segal) spends his days looking for just “one more fix”.

The woman was married to defendant Robert McClain, a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, at the time of the vicious attack, and pretended to castrate her 23-year-old boyfriend as the husband watched, prosecutors previously said. Through tears, the woman told jurors that she pleaded with her jealous husband to stop his violent two-hour rampage in September 2008 for the sake of his career and their children, the Orange County Register reported. McClain didn’t listen, she reportedly testified, and instead beat her boyfriend to the point of brain damage and slashed his body with a knife. The unidentified woman said her enraged hubby tried to have sex with her, ordered her to have sex with the badly injured boyfriend and demanded the castration as a sick form of retribution.

In the UK in the 1960s an attempt was made to reduce fly posting (the illegal pasting up of posters). Warning notices were put up with the legend ‘Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted’. Waggish fly posters responded with ‘Bill Stickers is Innocent’ notices. The joke wasn’t new in the 1960s though. In a New York newspaper The Olean Herald, 1884, there’s a piece reprinted from the London Graphic: “A countryman named William Stickers, flying to London to escape from rural justice, was appalled at reading on a wall: ‘Bill Stickers Beware!’ He went a little further, but reading again, ‘Bill Stickers will be punished with the utmost rigour of the law,’ gave himself up for lost and surrendered.”

A five-story-tall cylindrical metal tank, 90 feet in diamater had burst. A two-story-tall wave containing 2.3 million gallons of molasses issued forth, traveling out in all directions like a shock-wave. The molasses spread across the city at an estimated 35 miles per hour. And it wasn’t just the sugary tidal wave that was so deadly; the tank ripped into sharp projectiles, and shot metal bolts from its sides like bullets. As the wave and debris crashed down Commercial Street, buildings were smashed to bits. Some were picked up by their foundations and floated away in the tide of molasses. Electrical poles keeled over, exposing live wires. A steel elevated train support beam was torn to smithereens. Molasses covered everything. According to a Boston Post article, “Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly paper.” It wasn’t just horses. The great Boston molasses flood killed 21 people.

A 10-year-old girl from Colombia gave birth to a baby girl via cesarean section, Univision’s Primer Impacto, reported. The girl hails from an indigenous tribe in the town of Manaure, a town in the Colombian Department of La Guajira.

Reginald Gill, 77, conned women into believing they had cancer and told one victim she could be cured if a man sucked her breasts. Thanks Jasmine

The trio allegedly forged a sect called Cartel who wanted to purify the world and reduce the population according to police spokesman Democrito Honorato, from the Brazilian town of Guaranhuns. They were identified as Jorge Beltrao Negromonte and Elizabeth Pires da Silveira, both 51, and Bruna da Silva. Police allege they intended to kill three women per year. Once at their home, it is thought that the women were killed and their “meat” was cooked and used as the filling in a pastry dish known as empanada, which was then sold to unwitting neighbours.

The Rape-aXe system consists of a latex sheath, which contains razor-sharp barbs. The device is worn in her vagina like a tampon. When the attacker attempts vaginal penetration the barbs attach themselves to the penis, causing great discomfort. The device must be surgically removed, which will result in the positive identification of the attacker and subsequent arrest

A Recording Chronology Of The Early Days Of Psychedelic Culture This is an attempt to chronicle all relevant recording events during the early years in which psychedelic culture and pop/rock culture coalesced. The timeline does not deal with events outside rock music, and contains no entries related to jazz, avantgarde, exotica, etc. It is subjective to a certain degree, and some borderline entries that are not necessarily “psychedelic” have been included just the same. The dates have been verified against quality sources as far as possible. Prior to the 1965-66 era, a selection of important items have been included.

NSFW Ketchup performance art

✪ Slayer Reign in Blood Red Cabernet Sauvignon Vintage: 2010

As much as you love your Hell Awaits and Reign In Blood, you have now found a wine to match the music. Slayer one of the hardest thrash metal bands ever and pioneers in their genre, have chosen Sweden as the launch market for their first beverage, Slayer Reign in Blood Red! The wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon from California, is as uncomprimising and tough as the band. After a couple of Seasons in the Abyss, the wine has an undisputed attitude and a soft nose of dark berry fruits with oak and spicy nuances. Good mouth feel with hints of fresh fruit and juicy, smooth tannins. Well structured and rounded with subtle notes of oak, showing true Divine Intervention. Best company for the wine comes as no surprise, enjoy it while headbanging, riffing or with food, friends and great music. Reign in Wine!

Hope you have a Merry Christmas, America, because you’ve been extremely naughty at the mall this year. After surveying retailers in the U.S., the Global Retail Theft Barometer says that shoppers pinched $1.8 billion worth of merchandise during the four weeks leading up to Christmas, reports the AP. $1.8 billion! For context, $1.8 billion is a 6 percent increase from 2010 — a total of approximately 62 million Tickle Me Elmos at retail. And this is a year when there aren’t even any good toys to buy. When stores are offering big markdowns because people aren’t spending as much. But that’s exactly the point: while there will always be some built-in kleptomania to society, the sour economy drives some people to buy less and steal more. Or at least gives them a good excuse for doing so.

Change.org has released a petition calling for the resignation of Catholic Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, following comments the Cardinal made to FOX Chicago Sunday comparing the gay rights movement to the Klu Klux Klan’s anti-Catholicism. Equally Blessed, an umbrella group of pro-LGBT rights Catholic organizations, has reinforced the pushback by releasing a statement declaring in part that George, “has demeaned and demonized LGBT people in a manner unworthy of his office. In suggesting that the Catholic hierarchy has reason to fear LGBT people in the same way that blacks, Jews, Catholics and other minorities had reason to fear the murderous nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan, he has insulted the memory of the victims of the Klan’s violence and brutality.” The petition has already garnered well over half the 2,500 signatures the organization was aiming for.

The aquarium in the living room of Meir and Leah Lazar’s Baltimore County home isn’t just for decoration. The tilapia and bluegills packed into the 50-gallon glass tank are waiting their turn to wind up on dinner plates. Out back, Meir Lazar is putting the finishing touches on a bigger new home for the fish inside a plastic-covered greenhouse. There, he hopes, the waste from the fish he’s tending will help him raise enough lettuce, tomatoes and other produce to feed his family of five year-round. Sustainability is more than a buzzword for Meir Lazar, 32, a computer systems administrator and teacher who’s pursuing aquaponics in his small suburban backyard off Greenspring Avenue. He said he’s inspired at least in part by news reports about food tainted by pesticides, bacteria and even radiation from the Japanese nuclear reactor meltdown earlier this year.

Police were looking for a motive in a shooting in which they believe a man dressed as Santa Claus killed six family members in a Fort Worth, Texas, suburb on Christmas day before shooting himself. No one survived the carnage in the living room of a two-story apartment in Grapevine, Texas. Police said it was the single largest mass-shooting death in the city’s history and among the worst in Texas in recent years.

The economic, political and social outlook for 2012 is profoundly negative. The almost universal consensus, even among mainstream orthodox economists is pessimistic regarding the world economy. Although, even here, their predictions understate the scope and depth of the crises, there are powerful reasons to believe that beginning in 2012, we are heading toward a steeper decline than what was experienced during the Great Recession of 2008 – 2009. With fewer resources, greater debt and increasing popular resistance to shouldering the burden of saving the capitalist system, the governments cannot bail out the system. Many of the major institutions and economic relations which were cause and consequence of world and regional capitalist expansion over the past three decades are in the process of disintegration and disarray. The previous economic engines of global expansion, the US and the European Union, have exhausted their potentialities and are in open decline.

The alert goes out from a taxi driver or a street vendor, equipped with a high-end handheld radio and paid to work as a lookout known as a “halcon,” or hawk. The radio signal travels deep into the arid countryside, hours by foot from the nearest road. There, the 8-foot-tall (2-meter-tall) dark-green branches of the rockrose bush conceal a radio tower painted to match. A cable buried in the dirt draws power from a solar panel. A signal-boosting repeater relays the message along a network of powerful antennas and other repeaters that stretch hundreds of miles (kilometers) across Mexico, a shadow communications system allowing the cartel to coordinate drug deliveries, kidnapping, extortion and other crimes with the immediacy and precision of a modern military or law-enforcement agency.

In recent news, an up and coming rapper was killed in a crowded Atlanta mall. According to authorities, Joe Blackmon, aka “Killa Black,” was standing in line for a pair of Air Jordan Concords when he, accidentally, knocked a Jolly Rancher out of the hand of the man in front of him. The man, described only as “an African American in a black hoodie with saggin’ pants” pumped five rounds in him before fleeing the scene. Witnesses say that the crowd just stepped over the dying Blackmon like nothing happened ,some even refusing to let paramedics through for fear of losing their places in line… Recently, people were shocked that Brick Squad affiliate, Slim Dunkin, was murdered in an Atlanta studio, allegedly, stemming from a fight over a piece of candy. This tragic event was coupled by media images of mobs of people beating each other senseless over the new Air Jordan XI Concords

Submitter: Hello, I’m a librarian in [NY] and a huge college football fan. Shortly after the sex abuse scandal at Penn State I decided to look on amazon and in our library catalog to see if we had anything by or about Jerry Sandusky. There are 14 copies of his unfortunately titled autobiography, Touched, floating about according to WorldCat

The clandestine arrangement worked smoothly for years. The Israeli company shipped its Internet- monitoring equipment to a distributor in Denmark. Once there, workers stripped away the packaging and removed the labels. Then they sent it to a man named “Hossein” in Iran, an amiable technology distributor known to them only by his first name and impeccable English, say his partners in Israel and Denmark. Israeli trade, customs and defense officials say their departments didn’t know that the systems for peering into Internet traffic, sold under the brand name NetEnforcer, had gone to a country whose leaders have called for the destruction of the Jewish state. Israel’s ban on trade with its enemy failed, even though a paper trail on the deals was available in Denmark.

From inspectors’ abandoning of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as it succumbed to disaster to a delay in disclosing radiation leaks, Japan’s response to the nuclear accident caused by the March tsunami fell tragically short, a government-appointed investigative panel said on Monday. The failures, which the panel said worsened the extent of the disaster, were outlined in a 500-page interim report detailing Japan’s response to the calamitous events that unfolded at the Fukushima plant after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out all of the site’s power. Three of the plant’s six reactors overheated and their fuel melted down, and hydrogen explosions blew the tops off three reactor buildings, leading to a major leak of radiation at levels not seen since Chernobyl in 1986.

A recent analysis conducted by USA Today showed that American voters are fed up with both mainstream political parties and are leaving them in droves. The newspaper claims that “More than 2.5 million voters have left the Democratic and Republican parties since the 2008 elections.” Over the last decade this trend has only seemed to accelerate says USA Today. While many people feel there is little difference in the parties, their options remain slim. Yet, voters switching to Independent have climbed dramatically. According to the statistics gathered from eight swing states, “Democrats’ registration is down by 800,000 and Republicans’ by 350,000. Independents have gained 325,000.”

Over $7.2 million in drugs and 161 weapons were confiscated after a year long investigation by the Washington D.C. Police and the Bureau the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which operated as fictional rap label. According to Washington D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier, D.C. police and ATF agents acted as undercover officers and “music industry insiders” during the year-long sting. The police created the “Manic Enterprisess” studio in Northeast Washington, for fictional rap artist Richie Valdez in November of 2010. Agents then told the underground world and black market that they were seeking to purchase weapons and drugs. Over the course of the year, agents confiscated 161 firearms (including a rocket launcher), 29 assault weapons, 80 pounds of methamphetamine, 21 pounds of cocaine, 1.25 gallons of PCP, 24 pounds of marijuana, heroin and Ecstasy. “If these drugs and guns had made it to our streets, the impact would have been devastating to community,”

★ LAPD botched use of downtown crime cameras

Most of the surveillance cameras installed in downtown Los Angeles as part of an effort to help police crack down on crime have not been working for two years, according to interviews and records reviewed by The Times. The cameras were installed over the last few years in a highly publicized partnership between local business groups, which purchased them, and the Los Angeles Police Department, which was to monitor and maintain them. But officials said the majority of the cameras don’t work. Some broke down and were never fixed. In the case of six cameras purchased to watch over Little Tokyo, LAPD officials admit that they were never plugged in to the police station’s monitoring bank.

In Tanzania, body parts of albinos are a cash crop of sorts. A complete set of body parts – including limbs, genitals, ears, tongue and nose – can sell for $75,000. The surge in the use of albino body parts as a good luck charm is a result of the kind of marketing exercise by witch doctors who propagate the myth that spiritual potions made out of albino body parts bring good fortune. This has driven the demand among wealthy buyers and endangered the lives of Tanzanian albinos.

“While speaking with some of the firefighters on the scene she made statements that that’s what she was doing; that she was attempting to obtain these chemicals and was in the process of trying to manufacture methamphetamine,” police officer David Shelby told the station. “However, she said that she was not very good at it.” After Halfmoon had spent more than six hours inside Walmart, loss prevention officers alerted police about the suspect’s suspicious behavior in the back of the store, according to News 9. When an officer confronted Halfmoon at around 6 p.m., the suspect had allegedly just finished mixing a bottle of sulfuric acid with starter fluid, Shelby told Fox 23. Walmart is known for its low, low prices, but Shelby said she couldn’t afford to buy the drug ingredients. At the time of her arrest, Halfmoon had managed to round up meth ingredients including lithium and chemical drain cleaner, Tulsa World reports.

If it’s a quiet life you are after or you are worried about the end of the world, this underground bunker could be answer to your dreams. It’s nuclear and biochemically bomb proof and has enough room for an army. In fact, this Cold War missile silo was once owned by the U.S. military. Today the 185-acre site which cost $18 million to build back in the Fifties is for sale at $1.72 million

Authorities say Foster, 31, found the photo’s on the girl’s phone Wednesday night. To teach her a lesson, he sent the image to 37 of the contacts stored in the girl’s phone. The girl’s mother — Foster’s girlfriend — isn’t sure exactly who receieved the photos of her naked daughter, so she asked officials at the Florence Unified School District to send a warning to parents that kiddie porn may have been sent to their children. “To spread this photo further would not only add to the devastating embarrassment of one of our students, making a bad situation worse, it would make the sender subject to severe legal consequences,” Dawn Hawman, the district’s director of public relations, told parents. “The welfare of our students is always our top priority, and we appreciate your assistance in minimizing the damage done by one adult’s poor choices.”

Recently, Chengdu police made public 17 types of “casing markers/symbols”. “×” represents “plan operation”, ◇ represents “no one lives here”, a wavy line represents “beware of fierce dog”, while a rectangle with slashes represents “already thieved”. Police remind city residents to be on the lookout for secret symbols/signals made by thieves and to immediately report them to the police as well as remove them upon discovery.

The innocent-sounding “Mobile Information Call Act” would allow all sorts of nuisance calls to cell phones, eating into customers’ costly minutes, Sen. Chuck Schumer warned Sunday. “The floodgates would be open to telemarketers, who could call you on your cell phone during breakfast, lunch, dinner, no matter if you’re at home, at school, at the office,” said Schumer, who vowed to fight the legislation proposed by House Republicans.

The laser, resembling a rifle and known as an SMU 100, can dazzle and incapacitate targets up to 500m away with a wall of light up to three metres squared. It costs £25,000 and has an infrared scope to spot looters in poor visibility. Looking at the intense beam causes a short-lived effect similar to staring at the sun, forcing the target to turn away.

What started out as a joke has become an increasingly real proposition: Even though it’s not a “person,” we must now begin to debate whether Pepper Spray should grace TIME’s most discussed cover. No person, place or thing has come to define the absurdity of 2011 more than the “food product, essentially,” this suddenly ubiquitous lachrymatory agent/chemical weapon. Pepper spray, essentially, gave birth to the national media’s recognition of the Occupy Wall Street movement when NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna cowardly pepper-sprayed some unwitting young women. Without his depraved indifference to the freedom to assemble and the freedom of speech, the national media, and by extension the nation, might never have begun to discuss income inequality in earnest.

✖ Long and tough road ahead for work to decommission Fukushima nuclear reactors

After the expert committee of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) compiled a report on procedures to decommission the No. 1 to 4 reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant on Dec. 7, the actual work is expected to move into high gear after the turn of the year. As in the case of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, the workers would try to remove melted nuclear fuel after shielding radiation with water, a technique called a “water tomb.” But the work would have to be done in a “territory where humans have not stepped into before,” said a senior official of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the operator of the troubled Fukushima nuclear power station. The work is so difficult that it is expected to take more than 30 years to finish decommissioning the reactors.

Embarrassingly, I had to ask the monsignor to stand aside, so I could get a proper view of the most notorious image, of the randy goat-god Pan leaping from the bushes with a monstrous erection. I was shocked to see that the image had been vandalized. Someone had etched out Pan’s manhood and filled in the gap with white paint. This, of course, made the object even larger and more noticeable—another parable about the futility of censorship.

The problem now is that scientists are at a loss as to how to contain this pending disaster. What if large quantities of radioactive materials, which leaked into the sea when Fukushima went critical, slowly poison seas around the world, leading to contaminated seafood and widespread die-offs of ocean life? What will this do to living things on the West Coast? No one knows just how much radioactive material was dumped into the sea around Fukushima, as the Japanese government has been characteristically tight lipped. In late March, Japan’s government said scientists took samples of seawater from the Pacific Ocean around Fukushima. The government admitted that just north of the reactor, seawater was found to contain 1,150 times the safe limit of radioactive iodine. South of the site, that amount was 1,850 times.

At first things went smoothly, but as the money in his account dwindled, he began to ignore it. By fall, Ganziano had just $4.85 left in the account — too little to withdraw from an ATM — so he let it sit. He had all but forgotten about the account until he received a letter from TCF on Oct. 12 saying six days earlier, it had charged him a $9.95 “monthly maintenance fee” because his account had too little money in it. The $9.95 charge made his account overdrawn by $5.10, which triggered another fee. At TCF, any account overdrawn by more than $5 is charged a $28-a-day overdraft fee. The net result: Ganziano was $33.10 in the hole. By then, his nascent savings account was in a downward spiral. At $28 a day, the charges were adding up quickly. When he and his mother went to the nearest branch that weekend to close the account, they were told they would first have to pay the accumulated fees, which totaled $229.10.

More than than 4000 people from police and teachers to monks and children have been killed in the past 7 years by Muslims in southern Thailand, but hardly a word in the mainstream media. In Southern Thailand Muslim gunmen continue killing and threatening innocent citizens. The Muslim insurgents have threatened to kill 20 teachers and have distributed fliers that said, “WANTED: 20 Deaths of Buddhist teachers.” Muslim terrorists object to the education system which teaches Buddhist culture that is not acceptable in Islam. The attacks are intended to force Buddhists to leave the region because Muslims want to create an independent Muslim nation in the three southern provinces.